UNESCO literacy prizes for Mozambique & Madagascar

On Wednesday 22 July, UNESCO announced the recipients of the 2015 prizes for literacy efforts. Organizations in five countries (of which two in Africa - Madagascar and Mozambique) each received one of two categories of prizes:

• The UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize (2 annually)
• Associação Progresso, Mozambique
• National Institute of Education
  National Institute of Education, Sri Lanka
• The UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy (3 annually)
• La Plateforme des associations chargées de l’ASAMA et du post-ASAMA, Madagascar
• La Escuela Juan Luis Vives de Valparaíso, Chile
• Svatobor, Slovakia

King Sejong Literacy Prize

Of the two prizes, the King Sejong prize, named after the Korean monarch who designed Hangul (the Korean script), "gives special consideration to the promotion of mother-tongue languages in developing countries."

The Associação Progresso was described in the UNESCO release as "a Mozambican nongovernmental organization recognized for its effective ‘Literacy in Local Languages, Springboard for Gender Equality’ programme in Mozambican languages. It has achieved good results by building on international standards and research, training facilitators and involving the community in designing, monitoring and improving delivery."

Some background on Associação Progresso is available in a 2009 report mentioning its activities:*

“This case involves a partnership between Associação Progresso in Mozambique, and CODE, a Canadian organisation specialised in the promotion of quality primary education. Progresso and CODE have been working to increase the quality of education in the two Northern provinces of Mozambique for over 15 years. The activities in their joint programme, 'Promotion of a Literate Environment in Mozambique,' include the provision of reading and learning materials in Portuguese and local languages, skills development for primary teachers and adult literacy teachers, and training of education officers in specialised functions such as education planning, in-service training, and the monitoring of teaching and learning.

“Progresso and CODE work in close cooperation with the Mozambican Ministry of Education and Culture at the national and provincial levels. Their experience and innovative practices have influenced government policy, notably through the inclusion of a bilingual curriculum in the Government of Mozambique’s Education Sector Strategic Plan. ...”

It is unfortunate that such descriptions do not name the languages involved. If the activities are still concentrated in the north of the country, the languages might include for example: Makhuwa; Lomwe; Yao; and Nyanja.

Confucius Prize for Literacy 

The other prize, named after the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, recognizes "the activities of outstanding individuals, governments or governmental agencies and NGOs whose work in literacy serves rural adults and out-of-school youth, particularly women and girls." Often these also involve first languages.

According to the UNESCO release, La Plateforme des associations chargées de l’ASAMA et du post-ASAMA (Platform of Associations in Charge of ASAMA** and Post-ASAMA) is "an NGO in Madagascar that developed a comprehensive approach to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by establishing partnerships between the national authorities and 66 other NGOs. The programme provides a range of literacy courses for illiterates who account for 40% of the population, technical and vocational training at all levels and supports graduates in their efforts to find employment or start their own business."

It is not specified which language or languages are used, and I haven't found further information on that question elsewhere, but it may include literacy in Malagasy.

Past African winners of UNESCO literacy prizes

In past years, other African organizations have also received UNESCO literacy prizes. A list of African awardees over the previous seven years is presented below, with brief information on languages, where available.

Year	King Sejong Literacy Prize	Confucius Prize for Literacy
2014	L’Association pour la promotion de l’éducation non formelle du Burkina Faso (BF-APENF), Burkina Faso. - "activities in five local languages"	L’Association algérienne d’alphabétisation « IQRAA » (which means "read" in Arabic), Algeria. Bridges to the Future initiative of Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, South Africa & International Literacy Institute, USA. - "reaches primary school children and illiterate adults through a specially designed multilingual computer program that tries to bring a more cohesive learning experience to the learner."
2013	La Fédération des associations de promotion des langues du Guéra, Chad.  - literacy in maternal languages of Guéra region	Savoir pour mieux vivre (SAPOMIVIE), Ivory Coast. - literacy in maternal languages and a publication "translated into 23 languages including Senufo and Bambara. Maninka, Attié, Abidji, Kulango or Dan syllabaries are used." (Gban is also mentioned)  Directorate of Adult Education of the Ministry of Education, Namibia.  - "basic literacy course consists of a 3-year training, averaging some 240 hours per annum. The first two years combine basic mother tongue functional literacy, offered in eleven local languages and life skills. English is introduced during the third part of the training."
2012	National Adult Literacy Programme, Pentecostal Church, Rwanda. - (no specific mention of languages) (Honorable mention) Programme d’alphabétisation fonctionnelle à l’intention des femmes et des filles à travers des groupes de femmes et la formation tout au long de la vie of the Direction de l’alphabétisation et de l’éducation des adultes, Niger. - "covers not only reading, writing and counting in the mother tongues but also life skills and practical and productive activities" (Honorable mention) Programme d’alphabétisation et de post-alphabétisation : autonomisation et intégration socio-économique des femmes marocaines of the Direction de l’élimination de l’analphabétisme, Morocco.  - (no specific mention of languages)	(no African recipients this year)
2011	Service national d’alphabétisation, Burundi. - "The government-funded courses take place in more than 900 centres across the country and are delivered in the national language, Kirundi."	Collectif ALPHA UJUVI, D.R. Congo. - "... Peace Hut scheme ... runs alongside literacy classes for adults and young people in both Swahili and French."
2010	General Directorate of Adult Training, Cape Verde. - "Portuguese language lessons draw on real life in Cape Verde and are held in the national language, Crioulo, in all of the 17 education and adult education centres scattered throughout the archipelago."	Females for Families program of the Governrate of Ismailia, Egypt. - (no specific mention of languages) (Honorable mention) Women Land Rights Project, Coalition of Women Farmers, Malawi. -  (no specific mention of languages)
2009	Tin Tua, Burkina Faso. - "curriculum in five local languages covering basic literacy and numeracy skills along with practical knowledge about health, hygiene, human rights, gender and farming."	(no African recipients this year)
2008	Reflect and HIV/AIDS program of People's Action Forum, Zambia. - "The Jury admired the association’s use of local languages in teaching the rural women in their literacy programmes to be autonomous, following the motto: 'rather than wait for government to decide, people should be involved in the decision-making process.'"	Adult and Non-Formal Education Association (ANFEAE), Ethiopia. Operation Upgrade, South Africa. [information on the above two awardees from Wikipedia]

________
* Réal Lavergne and Jacqueline Wood, "Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness: Exploration of Experience and Good Practice. A Reference Document" (2nd ed.), Prepared for the Advisory Group on Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness, August 31, 2009.
** ASAMA stands for Asa sekoly avotra ho an'ny Malagasy in Malagasy and Action Scolaire d'Appoint pour les Malagasy Adolescent in French.

ANLoc workshop, Ain Sokhna, Egypt

I had the honor of participating in the recent workshop of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) in Ain Sukhna (or Sokhna, perhaps a colloquial pronunciation?), Egypt from 31 March to 2 April 2009. The actual location there was the Mövenpick Hotel.

ANLoc is a project including several subprojects and a network of the organizations involved in those efforts, and in localization in general. In effect it is addressing several pieces of what might rightly be regarded as the "foundation" for more effective localization of software and content in African languages. These include:

• Fonts - Many African languages are written in Latin-based orthographies that include extended characters (modified forms of other letters, often part of the IPA alphabet) and or diacritics that are not found or rare in European languages. Even though all (or almost all) are encoded in Unicode, not many fonts include them yet. This subproject aims to extend some open-source fonts to include such characters.


• Keyboards - Input of characters not provided for in traditional keyboard layouts requires conceptualizing and designing layouts to accommodate such needs. This is more complex than simple assignment of new characters in a keyboard driver, since issues of anticipating user needs and the possible standardization across languages within a country and across different orthographies in different countries are involved.


• Language and ICT Policy - There are two major areas of policy (especially of African governments, but also of other entities like development organizations and even industry) that impact the potential for localization - language and ICT policies. Although many do not agree with me, I see the overlap of these two policy areas as an emerging category of policy - "localization (L10n) policy."


• Locales - A locale (or locale data for a language and geographic location, generally a country) help computers accommodate different language profiles on computers and facilitate localization of software. Developing locales is a key to full presence of African languages in ICT.


• Localisation Tools - Localization of a software requires expertise in the software and knowledge of the language in which it is to be localized. Not many people have skills in both areas, and even assembling teams that group such expertise is sometimes difficult. Localization tools are really softwares to make the technical aspect of localization easy enough that people with only the requisite language skills can do it.


• Localise software - This is the object of a lot of the above, and the ANLoc project is sponsoring some pilot initiatives for actual open-source software localization. (One imagines that a future phase of ANLoc might take this on more fully, once the "foundation" work is more complete.)


• Spell checkers - A key to production of text in any language these days is good spell checkers. Although it might seem straightforward, spell checkers sometimes require a lot of work to accommodate the particularities of how a language may generate words in different contexts.


• Terminology - How often have you heard in discussion about an African language and technology of any sort that there is no way to say such-and-such in the language? There is a certain truth to the assertion, but it obscures the fact that terms for anything in recent technologies comes from something else or is outright invented. Carrying this process over to several African languages is the object of this subproject.


• Training - ANLoc will cosponsor some trainings related to localization.


• Network activities - As a complex project of sub-projects (which together form a network), ANLoc will hold verious meetings.

The workshop in Ain Sokhna provided the opportunity to discuss these various efforts, coordination among them, and suggestions by participants.

LISA Forum Cairo

Currently in Cairo for a conference organized by the Localization Industry Standards Association. I presented yeaterday and others who are part of the track on localization in African languages will present today. For more info, see http://www.lisa.org/events/2005cairo/.

I have not gotten to catching up on previous posts here, but will hopefully be able to do that soon (watch the space below) as well as give more info on the current event. Anyone reading this blog who has followed previous posts (not that I expect there is anyone, but you never know) will be familiar with the refrain that I don't always find it so easy to add to this.